Achievements

Achievements

August 2011- Our PhD student, Wei Deng had her paper accepted in prestigious Advanced Materials (IF 10.9) The publication is entitled "Ultrabright Eu-doped plasmonic Ag@SiO2 nanostructures - time gated bioprobes with single particle sensitivity and negligible background" and it describes a new design of ultrabright lanthanide doped nanoparticles. Lanthanides have significant advantages for bioimaging, including the absence of autofluorescence background common in living cells, but they are notoriously dark. Wei has been able to ovecome this limitation by using metal nanostructures to enhance Eu fluorescence. As an example of a biological application, Wei demonstrated an ultrasensitive bioassay. Congratulatons to Wei and the Macquarie support team (JIn Dayong, Krystyna Drozdowicz Tomsia, Prof. Ewa Goldys - supervisor). Our overseas collaborators are Prof. Jingli Yuan and Jing Wu from Dalian University in China.

July 2011 - David Inglis' work is drawing international atttention. His work "Simultaneous concetration and separation of proteins in nanochannels" (Inglis, Goldys, Calander, Angewandte Chemie 2011) was recently selected by the Nanowerk where it will feature in the Spotlight section (http://www.nanowerk.com/). Nanowerk is the leading information site for nanoscience and nanotechnology with thousands of readers every day. The highlighted publication appeared in Angewandte Chemie is one of the leading journals in chemistry (IF 12.7).
The scientific core is the finding is that a simple nanochannel that connects to chemically different solutions creates a stable and robust gradient between those two solutions. This gradient can then be used to perform separations and selective concentration enhancement. Such processes have previously been demonstrated in systems that create the gradient in more complex ways. Molecular separations are extremely important in a wide range of technologies, from conventional proteomics to DNA fingerprinting and future lab on a chip devices for pathogen detection. We believe that our paper demonstrates a new path in miniaturised molecular separations.